Five top books about nonsense

Maria Tatar is the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures. She chairs the Program in Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University, where she teaches courses in German Studies, Folklore, and Children’s Literature. One of her five top books about nonsense, as shared at Tor.com:

Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I make things up and write them down,” Gaiman tells us. In this long short story, we travel with the narrator into mythical terrain. It dawns on us only ever so gradually that a path with briars and brambles can be a time machine drawing us back to a childhood. In a place charged with what Bronislaw Malinowski called a high coefficient of weirdness, we meet mysterious cats, along with a magna mater in triplicate, and also discover the healing power of recovered memories.

Read about another book on the list.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is among Stephen H Segal and Valya Dudycz Lupescu's five books with families they’d like to live alongside as neighbors and Peter Straub's six favorite books.

--Marshal Zeringue